Interpreting Civil War Diaries

In working with my great-great grandfather's pocket diary, I struggled to decipher the elaborate handwriting now faded from 150 years passing. Using a magnifying glass was clumsy and I feared for the safety of the fragile diary if I handled it too much.

My solution was to photograph each page with my digital camera. I felt this would be less damaging than mashing the open diary face down on a scanner. I uploaded the photographed pages to my computer where I have Adobe Photoshop. I used Photoshop (other programs can do this also) to brighten the pages up. Experiment with "auto contrast" or "auto levels" to see which makes the writing clearer.

Then I printed out each diary page on a full 8 X 11 inch sheet of paper. Now I had the print large enough to more easily tell what some letters were. I could handle them as much as I wanted, and even make margin notes on these printed sheets.

In working with Abraham Bates Tower's journal, I found some capital letters puzzling me. Was that a "T" or an "F" or a "J" or an "I"?

Scan through the diary or letter looking for words that are obvious. Sometimes it is someone's name that you know how it should be spelled. Now apply that letter to other mystifying words. Fortunately in my ancestor's diary, he wrote an alphabetical list of the men in Company G of the 93rd Indiana Volunteer Infantry. That helped me decipher many of the capital letters.

In addition, I found online a book with the company roster. That gave me a second verification of the names and some of the ornate first letters.